THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

And I only whispered: "Cast off!
Throw your scorching spirit into the sea."
And he began to jump, to growl:
"You are better, quieter than Jonah."
I forgot my own blood,
All the names, and death, and terror—
Leviathan already swam in the sea,
Straining with all his might in contractions.
Oh, the labor was difficult. The poor creature!
A bloody fountain beat the sky.
When I flew out in the red foam,
How deep Leviathan dove!
In this poem, Lavinia radically rewrites the story of Jonah and the whale. Unlike Jonah,
who attempts to run away from God, Lavinia immediately heeds the call of the
Leviathan. Once she has entered into his belly, she finds an unearthly peace, forgetting
the world around her and even her own self. It is as if she has readily journeyed toward a
beckoning God, and, once she has arrived, experiences heaven—a utopia before the Fall.
An innocent child of God, she is ultimately born, like Christ, into the world. This link to
Christ is strengthened by the physical description of the Leviathan's labor in the final
stanzas, recalling the strange birth imagery in "Темная Рождественская песнь."
The Leviathan, however, is traditionally a symbol of chaos or Satan, not God. 226
This could suggest that Lavinia is in fact being enticed by and born of the devil; 227 the
poem as a whole, however, seems too positive for such a reading. 228
Instead, Lavinia's
relationship with the Leviathan highlights other Christ-like qualities in her, specifically
226 "Leviathan, both in the Bible (Job 41; Ps 74.14; Isa 27.1; see also Job 7.12; Isa 51.9; Hab 3.8) and in
other ancient Near Eastern literature, is a sea monster representing cosmic chaos." Michael D. Coogan, ed.,
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 730.
227 Later in the book, the devil appears as a tempter in several poems, a few of which I will discuss below.
228 Sandler describes Lavinia's experience of forgetting in this poem as inherently positive: "time spent
inside the whale is comforting and revelatory to Lavinia; memories of death and horror are wiped away,
and her own identity seems washed aside as well." Sandler, "Elena Shvarts and the Distances of Self-
Disclosure," 103 n.29. By treating the Leviathan as simply a "whale," however, Sandler does not address
its potentially negative force.
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